Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more.
Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more
Just … no
You may scoff, but I distinctly remember when “avocado” was declared to be the next new color choice back in the mid-60s, and sure enough, within a year or so I began seeing avocado refrigerators, cabinets, bathtubs and even toilets (!) in the homes of my friends’ parents. Even today, touring homes as a realtor, I still come across artifacts from that dreadful era.
Let’s make white the new pink.
please sir, may i have another?
45-year old (American) pledges to a fraternity, complains to police that his naked bottom was spanked “200 times” (was he really counting?)
A middle-aged Brooklyn man told cops he paid a painful price for pledging a fraternity at the ripe old age of 45 — by getting whacked on the backside hundreds of times with a wooden paddle, police sources said Friday.
Tory Gates, 45, said he was drinking “heavily” inside a Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone on Dec. 7 when the Omega Psi Phi brothers blindfolded him, whipped out a wooden paddle and told him to bend over, according to police sources.
That’s when they went more medieval than Greek on his heinie, whacking it up to 200 times with the paddle and their open hands, according to the sources.
The “Old School” meets “Animal House” booty lashing was part of a bizarre hazing ritual, Gates told cops.
He was so bruised up by the agonizing bashing that he checked himself into Mount Sinai Hospital — and called the cops on his would-be frat bros.
On Friday, the apartment where the alleged paddling went down on Marion Street was boarded up and had a chained-off gate.
A sticker with the phrase “We Black Men Care” was slapped on a door of the home.
Gates’ neighbors — who were stunned that he would go Greek so late in life — said he has two teenage kids.
“A hazing incident? Do you know how old he is?” said one neighbor, who asked not to be named.
“Maybe it’s about nostalgia or something. He’s a strong guy, physically, so I’m not sure what that is all about.”
Police said they were having trouble getting in touch with the victim Friday.
Back in the late 80s I was an associate at a smallish law firm and, being an associate, had to take whatever shit work they assigned me, and some of that was matrimonial law, which I hated, absolutely hated. But it did produce one shining moment.
We, unfortunately, represented the husband side of a DINK — double income, no kids — couple who were splitting up. Agreement on asset division went well: each had their own financial accounts, the house would be sold, proceeds split 50/50. no argument about who got the Lazy-Boy, who got the sofa, etc., but like so many of these cases, there were some deep, angry emotions under the surface, and those eventually focused on one object: who would get the new Saab turbo convertible?
Many hearings were held on that car; so many that the legal fees must have eaten up any equity there might have been in that damned machine, but the parties were adamant, so we pressed on and finally, we persevered, and hubby won the car.
Now, our client was a demanding, arrogant, son of a bitch, and wasn’t the firm’s most popular client, especially not mine, since I had the most contact with him. So when the idiot went home with the keys to the Saab and handed them to his girlfriend, and she sped off on a test drive and promptly totaled it, and when it turned out that title and insurance were still in the wife’s name, a great cheer erupted in our office.
Tee hee.
Robocalls on the rise, and people are switching to texting instead.
Like many, I’ve stopped answering calls from unknown numbers. If the caller leaves a message (rarely) I first check the duration of that message, and if it’s less than 30 seconds, I delete it.
The scammers will undoubtedly come up with a clever way to transition to text frauds but for now, if you want to contact me and you don’t think I’ve already got you on my contact list, leave a message, and make it longer than 30 seconds. Good advice when calling anyone for the first time.
People seem to be actually answering their phones less and less these days, also using them to make fewer calls when texting and social network messaging works just fine and is even quicker in many cases. Arguably helping that trend along is the fact that we don’t always know who it is on the other end of the phone when we get a call, thanks to the veritable explosion in robocalls and a myriad of scam-type phone calls.
Transaction Network Services has estimated that one-third of all calls placed in the first half of 2018 were robocalls. Also, the FTC says it gets about 400,000 complaints about robocalls every single day.
Drunken teacher bites student on the ass
A former middle school teacher has pleaded guilty to biting a 14-year-old girl’s butt as the teen played water volleyball during a Fourth of July celebration in Georgia.
Jonathan William Herbert, 30, will serve 30 days in jail and four years probation under the plea deal reached on Friday, according to The Daily Mail.
Herbert allegedly did nothing to hide his actions: Multiple witnesses saw the drunken educator swim underwater and bite the girl while in a lake north of Atlanta, authorities said. The perv then tried to bribe a cop with $200 after he was nabbed.
He didn’t have any connection to the girl or her family. Herbert resigned from his teaching job on Aug. 1.
Probably just as well.
(Daily Mail article on this incident reports that Mr. Herbert is a resident of Dacula, Georgia — do you suppose they dropped an “r”? )
The repeal of Obama’s “Net Neutrality” rule was going to destroy the Internet — it didn’t. In fact, it’s more robust than ever.
One year after FCC Chairman Ajit Pai liberated broadband networks, doomsayers have been proven wrong.
Of all the anti-Trump hysterias of our age, perhaps the most absurd and extreme was the charge that last year’s repeal of an Obama-era regulation would break the Internet. A year later, the Internet is still working just fine and in many ways much better for U.S. consumers.
The Obama strategy was to impose on the Internet old-fashioned telephone rules to force network operators to offer cheap service to heavy Internet users like Netflix and Google. It was a lobbying coup for the tech industry—getting Washington to cut Silicon Valley’s phone bill.
When Trump-appointed reformers wisely sought to roll back this misguided rule and restore the freedom that had allowed the Internet to thrive in the first place, the reaction was intense.
Roslyn Layton of the American Enterprise Institute writes:
A year ago today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) repealed the harmful 2015 internet regulation dubiously titled the “Open Internet Order.” The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNET, Ars Technica, Recode, The Verge, and advocacy groups such as Free Press and Public Knowledge predictably forecasted apocalyptic consequences to the rollback of the regulation, mischaracterizing the Restoring Internet Freedom Order (RIFO) which replaced it. CNN declared “the end of the internet as we know it,” and other media outlets said the RIFO was “gutting the rules that protect the internet,” and “that the internet has no oversight.” A year later, the internet is alive and well. The media and pundits are unlikely to issue corrections, but here are some facts to remember.
When the media talks about the end of the internet, they are referring to the end of the price control that favored Silicon Valley at the expense of consumers... In 2015 the FCC claimed that its rules were underpinned by a “virtuous circle” and predicted increased investment in and deployment of networks, but the opposite happened. Chairman Ajit Pai testified in Congress that the rules depressed investment and that the RIFO reversed that trend.
Behind the scenes of “reality” show, “House Hunters”. It will hardly surprise you that everything is staged and rehearsed, but a amusing read all the same.
I was contacted by a young woman, assistant to one of the producers of this show a few years ago, asking whether I could help locate some “high end” houses, budget “all the way up to a million dollars!” I told her that kind of mad money might buy a two-bedroom bungalow in our poorest section of town, but I could probably find her some entertaining homes in the five-plus range. She signed off, and I can only guess that she wasn’t calling from California, and had just a vague idea, based on something she might once had heard on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous (or something similar) that “Greenwich” meant high-end real estate, perhaps as costly as the best homes in her native Oklahoma.
Some figures from the past twelve months, 12/17/2007 -12/14/2018:
Rentals: 856
Single Family Sales: 670
Price ranges, single family:
<$2 370
$2-$2.5 70
$2.5-$3 58
$3.5-$4 34
$4-$4.5 21
$4.5-$5 12
$5-$5.5 13
$5.5-$6 12
$6 -$10 20
$10+ 8
If I continue to be bored, I’ll compute some genuine ask-to-get ratios, especially for houses in that high range where, a property that sold for $9.8 started at $25 million.
23 Fado Lane, Cos Cob, has sold for $867,526. I usually don’t write about houses at this end of the price range because I try to entertain, and there’s not too much to say about a 1965 split-level, but it’s all that’s on the MLS activity report today, I have to have some material, and what the heck, it’s always useful to know what’s going on at the other end of the bracket.
Besides, I’ve always liked Fado Lane. It’s a self-contained micro-neighborhood of split-levels built in the early 1960s, many of which, like this one, with tiny backyards carved out of ledge, with friendly neighbors, an annual block party, and a convenient location, perched at the lower end of Cat Rock. As a place to get a toehold in Greenwich, it’s not a bad place to start and even, gasp, stay.
Houses like this have been selling in the high$7s to mid-$8s for lengthy period now, with little to no appreciation (this seller paid $830,000 in 2006) and even, though it might have been a miscalculation, $915,000, for No. 27, in 2017.
So, nothing spectacular here, but nice street in a neighborhood that, ignoring inflation, seems to be holding its value.
Self-proclaimed comedian Amy Schumer announces “I’m not going to look super-f***able anymore”.
No worries, Amy.
UPDATE: I hadn’t realized that this woman is Chuck Schumer’s niece, but other readers knew, and Holden provides this documentary evidence tp prove the relationship:
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